Current 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) long term evolution (LTE) specifications define requirements for device-to-device (D2D) communication. Such communication may be between two devices and current systems may not scale to provide D2D multicast communications. Further, when such communication is extended to multicast D2D operations from a device to a group of peer devices, coordination of such communication may require input from multiple network-side elements such as evolved Node Bs (eNodeBs). Nevertheless, some groups of peer user equipment (UEs) may be located within range of a single eNodeB and coordination for such systems may be simplified.
Thus, there exists a general need to provide methods and apparatuses to enable or optimize device-to-device multicast communications. Further, there exists a general need to provide for coordination for cases when groups of devices are located within a geographic area served by an eNodeB.